Sunday 21 November 2010

Prezi

This month, I was checking out some materials concerned about making a good presentation, mainly for a particular reason, I fail to cut it short, give the essence and the motivation to the ones who were not motivated about it in the first place.

Even in the coziest of presentations , you present just a portion of a huge amount of work, in a very limited time, to a group of people who are already racing towards the coffee break in or their minds, or thinking of ways to hunt that particular someone on his way to his decaf salvation latte, with tiny little biscuits.

So, here you are , with a bunch of heads with different thought balloons, with bars of hunger, blobs of social networks, more blobs of fancied social networks, with a double line research topic, which is extremely interesting of course, not a single doubt about that, but only a subset of this crowd has ever heard about it, and may or may not pay attention, if they are still awake. Here, attention is the Simoleon, one first decides whether to pay attention or not, then acts accordingly.

If you are presenting a 45 minute lecture to a crowd where attention is materialized as a bright red spherical blob levitating in the middle of the lecture hall, and waiting for your first word to burst and flow towards you, creating small waterfalls in between, well, lucky you, you can even read your research paper in the most monotonous tone ever.

But well, that 45 minutes is most likely to be 10 minutes, and it may only be able to give a taste of your research in that time*attention-span, you need your own blue banana to steal attention in most ridiculous ways.

A different presentation may be a professional and concealed way to achieve that. Prezi is a new web service to create presentations, with a twist though. It has a novel graphical style to present, making it easier to fool the crowd, put emphasis on the hierarchy or flow of ideas, and makes this with a new interface, which will indeed make your presentation remembered with all the other Powerpoint presentations presenting ideas with a linear (literally linear, no maths here) flow.

And probably one example will be much more helpful than all these I said:

You may be a student with an .edu or .edu.tr email then don't remember to sign up to the service with the educational discount.
Some useful links:

Conference Presentation Judo Notes:
Some Rules for Making a Presentation - Mihai Budiu
How to Present a Paper - Leslie Lamport

Cheers.

Mali

Thursday 1 July 2010

Tamir-ötesi

Tamir-ötesi: T.C. Adalet Sisteminden Bir Macrofail Theory Örnekleri Serisi

Mahkeme katibi: Kaç çocuğun var?
Sanık: Altı.
Mahkeme katibi: Aylık gelirin?
Sanık: Yok öyle bir şey.

Suç: Karşılıksız çek düzenlemek.



Thursday 3 June 2010

Thoughts About a Hypothetical Social Network for Activists I

Freedom for Gaza Movement Flotilla and the Social Networks

When I heard about the attacks towards Free Gaza Flotilla, I looked up in the Internet about how the social networks responded. With many activist networks that are interconnected in a dense way, Twitter and Facebook come first in place. I looked up Twitter first, the social network that served as one of the information source about Iranian elections and violence that took right after, expecting that its structure is the most suitable for a protest to propogate within. I found out that many of those who protested or sent out news used the #flotilla tag in Twitter, which means that that tweet is about#flotilla, with many other tweets. Expecting the #flotilla topic to rise in rank, many people were tweeting about the incident. Depending upon the number of tweets in unit time, it was sure that #flotilla was the topic that was the most tweeted about. But the website, though it must've been an automatic process didn't put it into the trending topics, causing many twitter users to suspect censorship. This action, if it is taken on purpose, has limited the number of links that each tweet could make with others, thus limited the propogation of information, and supressed a probable exponantial boom in awareness in user numbers. The number of links, which is tweets in Twitter, inbetween each user within social web, is the key parameter that controls whether a news about an incident exceed the critical rate of spread. Links matter a lot.

Thinking about the possibility that Twitter could've been at least undergoing a data mining procedure about the tweets that is shared within its network, and supressing those which could've been disturbing to the wider audience. That could've been the case, since the flotilla topics are associated to thePalestanian conflict, and since most of the world is both politically and spatially distant to most of what is going on there, and even most of the time clueless about what is happening, It might be an adventageous policy for Twitter to supress "extremes" from those who are "fed up" about Middle East crises and want to see Lakers trending instead.

Properties of Social Networks

So with the assumption that such censorship was in action, I thought about where actually these social webs fit in a set of all probable structures. Most social networks show some features that we take for granted. For example, in most of those networks, we know about the person that we are connected with, we know who she is, we have a tendency to confirm that the person exists in real life, the social link inbetween is generally persistent, and we are exposed to a huge amount of social data via a page that is always up to date. Chatroulette might be the example that is out of this generalization, though it has a very different emphasis. Another property of most of the social networks that it is a service. A service that though its clients are mobile, its servers are immobile. It is not a social network, but the Torrent network might be a very good example not working in this fashion, and is a good example about my upcoming claim.

If they differ, these networks differ in topology. For example Facebook is one of those networks that nodes are very common, and a single link is very rare (which is actually a user with only one friend). So everybody knows about every single action taken by others. A groupware in contrast, has a graph, that is hierarchized in a way. Every employee has one way links to her inferior, whereas distinct workgroups are clearly defined, with roundabout links inbetween, in order to facilitate focusing. The first introduces endless opportunities and self organization, the other sustains easy control and is very energy efficient.

Though many of these properties that I cited are generally taken as very natural, due to our circumstances, but the area that I will ve trying to implement social networking to, requires to abandon these presuppositions.

Thoughts About a Hypothetical Social Network for Activists.

I think that the current social networking scheme is unable to provide the needs of activism. What made me think about that is not only the recent observations I made in Twitter, but set of rules, or in other words a systematized culture which is called the Security Culture1,2 , that has rules for those that are targeted by government, for example activists.

In short, the Security Culture has this social links of don't ask, don't tell, in order to prevent infiltration. It reminds activists that when an information is shared, an action is bragged about or any nonanonymity would result in weakness of the whole structure. It depends on the fact that when a fellow is investigated, she cannot tell what she doesn't know about you or the protest. In contrast of many social links that we encounter in Facebook, for example, this network calls for different needs, and they differ a lot in essence.

A Social Network on the Internet that activist groups are going to use will indeed introduce some very exotic properties. I will be writing a set of articles, from time to time depending on the Security Culture requisites, I will try to build a hypothetical network, in other words brainstorm about how a suitable system can be obtained for activist groups, that would help them only and only in their cause, how problems might arise and how could one get over them.

In my opinion there seems to be a gap in the social networks that is in use today. This approach, seems to alter the way that we consider information, how it is shared, its back-traceability, how social hubs are formed and such. Since, first of all, and probably for the first time, we will require a social web to show as small information as possible from our neighbors, and the ability to recruit fast and anonymously.

It is a fun challenge to consider.

Will be continued.

Friday 21 May 2010

Ahem.. Where is your god now?

'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8695862.stm



Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first synthetic living cell.

The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell.

The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.

The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.

Sunday 4 April 2010

Geçmiş Zamanın Rivayeti - İTÜ Sahnesi Oyunu

İTÜ Sahnesi, yeni oyunu "Geçmiş Zamanın Rivayeti" ile 8 Nisan 2010'da sahneye çıkıyor.

Sahne, geçen sene sahnelediği "Şimdiki Zamanın Rivayeti" oyunundaki gibi kendi metnini derlemiş. İstanbul'da ulaşımı olan herkesi oyunu izlemeye çağırırım, tavsiye ederim.

Oyun Günleri ve saatleri:

8 Nisan Perşembe , 18.00
9 Nisan Cuma , 19.00

Mekan: İTÜ Maslak Kampüsü KSB Oditoryum

Bilet ve Sorularınız için:
0533 341 70 00
0555 202 42 23
E-Posta: info@itusahnesi.com

Oyunun Afişi:


Saturday 2 January 2010

Sinir Müzik


Billings sistemini taklit etmeye çalışan Yapay Sinir Ağının çıkışından elde ettiğim şarkı:


Üst harmoniklerdeki dahiyane detaylara dikkat çekerim.

Sunday 6 December 2009